A conventional cellular mobile/radio system is composed of numerous mobile units, such as handsets operated by individual users, which home-on associated base stations. A single base station serves a number of mobile units that lie within a simply connected geographical area-a cell-identified to that single base unit.
The enormous potential demand for wireless communication services combined with a limited amount of available radio spectrum has motivated extensive study of bandwidth-efficient, multiple-access techniques for wireless applications. Two such techniques that have been widely proposed for wireless cellular applications, such as mobile cellular and Personal Communication Services (PCS), are Time-Division Multiple-Access (TDMA) and Code-Division Multiple-Access (CDMA). Each offers advantages and disadvantages, which vary in degree of importance, depending on the application, expected traffic types, channel characteristics, allowed complexity, and network configuration. However, the prior art is devoid of teachings or suggestions on an inter-dependent combination of TDMA and CDMA that advantageously utilizes the primary characteristics of each technique.